[JDEV] request for ideas: RFC822 to JID mapping

[Matthias Wimmer]

Hi Hiroaki!

Hiroaki Nakamura wrote:

>>(Note: to see the above example your mail reader has to support UTF8.)
>>    
>>
>My mail reader supports UTF-8 and I use "Lucida Sans Unicode" font,
>still I can't see above example. Characters are displayed as white boxes
>with black borders. Sad, but it's the way it is.
>
Yeah ... that's the replacement character the font you're using is not 
able to display this characters (that were part of hiragana and katakana 
(Chinese)). I'm using Mozilla that has the nice feature to replace fonts 
if the original selected font doesn't include a representation for a 
character instead of just displaying the replacement character.

>Well, maybe I am too conservative, but I think we should use only latin
>characters for IDs (e.g. mail address). Non-latin characters are ok in
>attributes (e.g. display names or mail body).  Even when every software
>becomes Unicode aware and everyone has Unicode fonts, I think this rule
>should not be changed.  For people all around the world, the least common
>denominator of characters is latin.  They may not recognize nor distinct
>Japanese names.  So I think we should stick to latin IDs. It is OK to use
>non-latin IDs if all users of that application are from the same country.
>
>As for Jabber, I am happy with latin JIDs as far as I can have non-latin
>nicknames.
>  
>
In Jabber non-latin characters are already possible. Jabber is based on 
UTF-8 that can express any character that has a code point in Unicode. 
For node identifiers (= user names) in Jabber every unicode character 
but " & ' : < > @ and control characters are allowed.

We don't have to decide about unicode in domains and e-mail addresses, 
but we (if we use the smtp-t) need a mapping from JIDs to e-mail addresses.
But: I realy think that internationalized domains are a good thing. I 
know many people are against them because they think that it will devide 
the internet into parts that are not accessible from everywhere. But 
think about it: A web site that is only available in Chinese language. 
Where is the need that it is also accessible by somebody who is not able 
to to write a Chinese domain name? If the website has also English 
content, I'm sure the webmaster will care that it is also accessible by 
a domain that only contains English letters.
The same is true for mail addresses: Why shouldn't someone that only 
speaks Thai use a mail address that is not made by Thai letters? There 
is no need that somebody that is not able to write Thai letters can 
write him an e mail as he wouldn't be able to read it. As soon as he 
learns Frensh he will get an e mail address that only contains letters 
that are part of the French alphabet.


Tot kijk
   Matthias

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